Sites like Backpage.com, Gab, and others have had legal protection under decades old law meant to help the Internet grow. It worked, but it left us with a problem policing the Internet. Backpage had immunity for a lot of what happened on the site. It took a long time to get them and good luck in an overseas raid was critical. New laws were passed to make sure it was never that hard to bring similar sites down again.

We can't use those new laws against Gab yet, but boycotting service providers has proven to be effective in making them turn on Gab. It has also lead to Gab censoring content on their own site under threat of being shut down. None of that would be possible if Gab and similar sites were protected by new common carrier style laws.

That is what I'm worried about.

A certain amount of self policing happens on Gab and similar sites because they are under threat of being shut down. If they are protected by law that removes immunity from providers no longer operating as a common carrier style service, they may be less inclined to self moderate. They aren't doing much of that now. I would be scared to see where they go without existing limits.